Say hello to Netflix Conformity Monkey

We knew Netflix was going to keep churning out “monkeys” to help us with our cloud computing deployments because it told us so. So, meet Conformity Monkey, the latest member of the company’s Simian Army to be made available to the public.

The latest monkey, like its cousins, runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where it looks for rogue instances — or at least instances that aren’t behaving according to predefined rules for best practices. According to the Netflix blog announcing the debut:

Conformity Monkey determines whether an instance is nonconforming by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the instance is not conforming, the monkey sends an email notification to the owner of the instance. We provide a collection of conformity rules in the open sourced version that are currently used at Netflix and believed general enough to be used by most users. The design of Conformity Monkey also makes it simple to customize rules or to add new ones.

Netflix has built a reputation for wringing the best out of Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure and it’s trying to entrench the open-sourced tools its used there to third parties. Conformity Monkey is just the latest of what looks to be several monkeys to come — as Netflix chief cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft will no doubt talk about at Structure 2013 next month.